Innholdsfortegnelse for February 23, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America by Julie Flavell. Liveright, 462 pp., $35.00 Lost wars, especially when defeat comes as a rude surprise, inevitably spark painful self-examination. Pundits and politicians, and then historians, generally ask the same questions. How could a strong and confident nation have suffered such an embarrassing setback? Who precisely is to blame? How could the leaders directing the war have failed so spectacularly to devise a winning strategy? And perhaps most important, what should the losers learn from a contest that revealed their profound ignorance about the character of their adversaries? Such scrutiny is an important element in moving forward, since swirling uncertainty about responsibility can lend credibility to conspiracy theories denouncing mysterious internal…

Edward Hopper’s New York an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Kim Conaty, with essays by Kirsty Bell, Darby English, and David Hartt, and contributions by David Crane, Jennie Goldstein, Melinda Lang, and Farris Wahbeh. Whitney Museum of American Art, 255 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) “Edward Hopper’s New York,” the sumptuous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives us one more chance to retire—at least for a decent interval—those once glamorous words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings: alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, the uncanny. Such neon abstractions give us the illusion that we have dispelled the puzzlement we often feel in front of Hopper’s…

Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber by Charles Barber. Scarecrow, 365 pp., $131.00; $53.00 (paper) Carlos Kleiber: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon 12 CDs and 1 Blu-ray disc (2018) The two most substantial documents of the conductor Carlos Kleiber’s career released in recent years—the epistolary biography Corresponding with Carlos by Charles Barber and Kleiber’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon—have a notable feature in common: Kleiber, who died in 2004, would surely not have wanted either to see the light of day. Conductors tend to be acutely conscious of their legacies, which may be embodied both in the cultural institutions they lead and the recordings they leave behind. But the German-Argentine Kleiber, a once-in-a-century comet of conducting talent, had nothing but disdain for legacy-building: one of his lifelong mottos,…

Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals by Jack Ashby. University of Chicago Press, 369 pp., $29.00 Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future by Danielle Clode. Norton, 322 pp., $27.95 Platypus Matters is Jack Ashby’s paean to a creature that he proclaims to be his favorite. Ashby, the assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, first became enamored of the platypus while examining a freeze-dried specimen held in the collections under his care. Freeze-drying leaves animals looking remarkably lifelike (unlike taxidermy, which can distort them), and the experience of handling such an exhibit left Ashby thirsting to see an actual, living platypus. So he traveled to Australia, and this charming, informative book is the result. Platypuses, famously, are mammals that have…

Tetiana, a young activist I met in Lviv last December, works part-time as a tattooist. People often ask for tattoos of the Ukrainian flag or the country’s trident symbol, she told me, but one of the most popular since Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine a year ago is the word volya, which means both “will,” as in willpower, and “freedom.” It captures the essence of what I saw in Ukraine—and of what Ukraine is reminding the world. “The secret of happiness is liberty,” Thucydides has Pericles say in a funeral oration in ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, “and the secret of liberty is courage.” The courage to live and die for freedom is most obviously apparent in the men and women of the Ukrainian armed forces. Take Yevhen, for…

A truism for our times: a story doesn’t need to be factual to go viral. In June 2020, not long into the Covid-19 pandemic, an Instagram user shared a video of a mustachioed man wearing floral shorts and a cropped tank top, pouring himself some beer at a crowded bar in Santos, a coastal city in southeastern Brazil. According to the caption, the man was Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. He had apparently decided to break the quarantine by ditching his shoes and dancing to a forró song called “Já que me ensinou a beber” (Since You Taught Me to Drink). Of course, it wasn’t the director of the WHO in the video, which was actually recorded before the start of the pandemic. Nonetheless it…

Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 20, 2022–February 12, 2023; and the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, March 18–June 18, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Peter Humfrey and others. National Gallery of Art/Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale/Yale University Press, 340 pp., $65.00 That Venice is among the wonders of the world strikes everyone who sees it, but its glory was never greater than in the early sixteenth century, when it was possibly the richest and most cultivated city in Europe. The wealth of its citizens, the splendor of its buildings, the magnificence of the art and tapestries and jewelry on display everywhere, the vitality of its intellectual life, and the stability of its republican form of government made it…

Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution by Yasmin El-Rifae. Verso, 218 pp., $24.95 In the fall of 2012, almost two years into the Egyptian revolution, there began to be more and more reports of sexual attacks on women at demonstrations in Egypt. Since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster in February 2011, the country had been undergoing a chaotic, contentious political transition. An interim military government was dedicated to protecting the interests of the old regime, Islamist parties were pursuing political power, and various prorevolution groups were clamoring for real reforms. Large crowds were still gathering regularly, most often in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In these crowds, women were encircled by groups of men, stripped, beaten, raped, and dragged from one end of the square to the other. Sometimes hundreds of men were involved;…